by Joe Godfrey | May 21, 2019 | SavvyAnalysis Puzzlers
I grew up in a river town – Cincinnati – then moved to a lake town – Chicago – and then to an ocean town – Encinitas, CA just north of San Diego. I just started listening to David McCullough’s new book The Pioneers and was happy to...
by Mike Busch | May 1, 2019 | AOPA Pilot Magazine, Magazine Articles
Before doing something expensive or invasive, slow down “My Cirrus SR22’s oil pressure has been slowly decreasing,” reported Oliver, one of my company’s managed maintenance clients. “At full power the pressure used to be 41-43 PSI, but over the past three months it...
by Joe Godfrey | Apr 23, 2019 | SavvyAnalysis Puzzlers
These days it’s call throwing shade. When I came up, good jazz musicians had a nice-but-direct way of telling wanna be jazz musicians that they weren’t up to the task – “don’t give up your day gig.” Dr. Graeme Smart has a day gig...
by Mike Busch | Apr 1, 2019 | AOPA Pilot Magazine, Magazine Articles
Not preheating a cold engine is a effective way to damage it Preheating is important. A single cold start without proper preheating can produce more wear on your engine in less than a minute than 500 hours of normal cruise operation I’m often asked how cold it...
by Joe Godfrey | Mar 18, 2019 | SavvyAnalysis Puzzlers
I have been flying my Bellanca Viking for 29 years now. I have had two unexplained events – one electrical and one combustion – both in day VMC. I was alone for both. The electrical event was on approach to a central California airport with a tower. I had...
by Mike Busch | Mar 1, 2019 | AOPA Pilot Magazine, Magazine Articles
Reviving an engine that has been inactive for months or years Piston aircraft engines hate to sit unflown. During lengthy periods of disuse, the protective oil film strips off critical surfaces like cylinder walls, cam lobes and tappet faces, exposing them to risk of...
by Joe Godfrey | Feb 16, 2019 | SavvyAnalysis Puzzlers
Phoebe Snow’s recording of “No Regrets” is on one of my playlists, and I can’t hear the song without thinking of the Milky Way ad where the distracted tattoo artist gives her customer something to – uh, regert. Sometimes engine data will...
by Mike Busch | Feb 1, 2019 | AOPA Pilot Magazine, Magazine Articles
When mechanics get interrupted, bad things can happen I was recently contacted by the owner of a Cessna Hawk XP (R172K)—I’ll call him “Sam”—who seemed rather shaken by a recent series of events. He told me he was a student pilot with solo flight privileges and ready...
by Joe Godfrey | Jan 19, 2019 | SavvyAnalysis Puzzlers
They say what goes around comes around. As the new year arrived and I began my 5th year of writing these Puzzlers, I wondered what I could do to keep things interesting and informative. You the reader and I, acting as your agent scrubbing the uploaded data for good...
by Mike Busch | Jan 1, 2019 | AOPA Pilot Magazine, Magazine Articles
Taking the complexity out of cylinder break-in From time to time, every piston aircraft owner faces the question of how best to break-in new cylinders. Sometimes this involves just one or two newly-replaced cylinders, other times all cylinders have been replaced...
